


The Families Job

by FletcherHonorama



Series: Leverage International [3]
Category: Leverage
Genre: Canon Compliant, Multi, POV Parker (Leverage), Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-07-04
Packaged: 2020-06-09 14:04:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19477423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FletcherHonorama/pseuds/FletcherHonorama
Summary: Parker had come late to the whole having a family thing, but she was definitely getting the hang of it.





	The Families Job

**Author's Note:**

> Big thanks to both YourOzness and the_original_n_chan for betas on this one!

The best thing about their situation in Portland was that there was always somewhere Parker could go when she wanted to be alone, and every place still felt like home. There was the brewpub and there was the house Hardison bought for them, and Parker had a couple of boltholes of her own. She didn’t use them normally, but they would be there if she needed them. And of course Eliot had his own place as well, over near the bridge and the park and everything, but Parker hadn’t been there and she didn’t think Hardison had either. That was the whole idea. It was his place, just like Parker’s were hers.

The way Parker saw it, there would be a lot more successful relationships of every kind if there was always one property per person at the very least. That way everyone could keep their stuff where they wanted it, sleep where they wanted to and spend time with people without ever being stuck together. If one person wanted to make noise and someone else needed quiet, there didn’t have to be a fight about it. This was where so many couples went wrong. They spent all their time together in the same place.

Hardison was especially good at telling Parker where he was going to be on any given day, and then once she knew that, she knew the probabilities of where Eliot would be as well. He didn’t let her know like Hardison did, but it wasn’t hard to work out. Eliot never went to the house unless he was invited, so if Hardison wasn’t there and Parker wasn’t there, Eliot wouldn’t be. If Hardison was going to be at the brewpub working, there was about a sixty percent chance Eliot would be there as well. If he knew Hardison and Parker were both going to be there working, he was there nearly ninety percent of the time. If Hardison and Parker had planned some romantic time or some sexy time, then Eliot would be nowhere to be found. 

Tonight Hardison would be at the brewpub doing whatever, and so Parker had the house all to herself. She needed it to herself tonight. She had a very important phone call to make.

She’d gotten the email three days ago, at 8:56 in the evening, to her personal email account. She’d read it when she checked her emails at 10:25, after they’d wrapped up with a client and headed out back to tie up the loose ends and declare the job done. Hardison and Eliot were still arguing about whether it was more important for fight scenes in movies to be well acted or well choreographed, so neither of them noticed when Parker left the building, which was only to be expected. She hadn’t wanted them to.

 _Good evening Parker,_ the email said. _This is Hayley Drummond. I’m Archie’s daughter. Or I should say one of Archie’s daughters. I don’t know if Dad ever told you my name. Maybe you know it anyway._

_I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get in contact with you after we first met. There were a lot of things I had to work out with Dad first._

When she’d showed it to Hardison hours later, he’d read it quietly. She’d buried her face in his shoulder and he’d put his arms around her. “You can have whatever family you want, babe,” he’d said. 

When Eliot had read it, he’d just nodded and handed the phone back. “That’s a real nice email,” he’d said. 

Parker had thought so too. It was short and simple, got right to the point, didn’t say anything mean about Parker or Archie, didn’t say too much about feelings and very carefully didn’t mention anything that incriminated anyone. It said she would really like for them to meet but that it was Parker’s choice if she wanted to get in touch or not. _I can understand if it’s not something you’d be interested in doing after all this time._

There was something in the tone of the letter that felt very familiar to Parker, some kind of underlying feeling that she recognized, but she’d read the whole thing over sixty-five times since Wednesday and still hadn’t worked it out. 

And now it was after 5:30 on Saturday, when Hayley had said Parker could call if she wanted to. _The kids will be with their father until late Sunday, so there won’t be any disruptions._ Parker had arranged to be on her own at the house so she could make the call in private. She’d made up some scripts for how the conversation might go and made some notes of things absolutely _not_ to say under any circumstances. She’d written down some ways the conversation might make her feel and how she could deal with those without accidentally being rude.

And she really had planned to call. She was being invited to be a real part of Archie’s family, or at least to try. She’d waited so long for this, and here was her chance, and it was a super-nice email that Hayley had sent, but for some reason Parker’s fingers wouldn’t let her go to the number and hit dial. 

Parker missed Sophie a lot. She didn’t think Eliot or Hardison missed Sophie like she did. They’d liked her, but they hadn’t needed her. And Parker didn’t quite need Sophie any more, but she still wanted her sometimes. There was no _reason_ not to call Hayley, and Parker couldn’t work out any of the feelings that were stopping her from doing it. The only person she wanted to talk to right now was Sophie, but calling Sophie was only for emergencies, and this wasn’t one. Parker would have to work it out for herself.

She had a bowl of cereal and played hide and seek with Hardison’s prototype motion-detecting robot for a while. She washed her hair. She went through a bucket of locks (16 minutes, 19 seconds) and checked all her bank accounts ($67,240,113.89). She had another bowl of cereal. She brushed her teeth and tidied up the kitchen.

She still didn’t want to call.

* * *

It was 11:37pm when Parker arrived at the brewpub. Normally at around that time Eliot and Hardison were watching sports or telling stories or talking shop, if Eliot hadn’t already gone back to spend the night at his own place. Sometimes Hardison would be working on the book but Eliot still hung around all the same. They’d talked about it, Eliot and Parker, about how much time Hardison spent doing what he called bookwork, all hyperfocused and on his own, and they’d decided to keep on sticking their noses in, even though Parker could only ever understand about five percent of what he was doing and Eliot maybe point five of a percent.

That was why they kept doing so many smaller jobs as well, usually one or two a week. For one, Parker had been bored, and for two, it pulled Hardison out of his computer cave, and for three, the reflex to reach out to Nate or Sophie was fading a little bit more with every job they saw through together from start to finish. They were finding and filling the little gaps in the system, reworking and resetting and re-skilling. It was nice. Parker was starting to take the lead in some of the client meetings, and she was getting more comfortable in the persona: part Nate, part Sophie, part Parker and part Alice White, with quantities adjusted according to circumstance. She still hadn’t gotten the opportunity to give Nate’s Leverage speech, though. She’d been practicing it a lot, and Hardison said it was getting good, but the right moment hadn’t presented itself yet.

Parker was thinking so hard about work to stop herself from thinking about Hayley Drummond – and she hadn’t known the name, Archie had never told her – that she wasn’t really paying much attention when she came through the door, so the sight of Eliot and Hardison in tank tops and sweatpants out in the open floor, circling each other with slow, precise footwork caught her completely by surprise. She had to watch them for thirty seconds before she was convinced that what she was seeing was real.

Hardison was finally letting Eliot really properly train him. 

Parker could feel her smile wide on her face. It was finally, finally, _finally_ happening. 

Whenever Eliot had tried to train Hardison before, it lasted twenty minutes maximum before one or both of them got fed up, and there was never a follow-up session. Hardison was very open to learning tricks and shortcuts, and he’d take tips that were offered to him, but as soon as he realized something didn’t come easily to him, he found a way to squirm out of it. Hardison had taught himself almost everything he knew, and the things he couldn’t teach himself or pick up quickly, he didn’t really want to know. Sophie called it “the artistic temperament”. Eliot called it “gifted kid bullshit” and said if Hardison didn’t want to learn, then how could Eliot teach him anything. Parker just knew that it was one of those things about Hardison that she’d never be able to understand. It was okay to have those. It didn’t stop her loving him.

She watched him now, trying to think if she’d ever seen him concentrate so hard before on something that wasn’t powered by electricity. She could tell from the set of his shoulders and his little frown and the heaviness of his step that he was tired, but he was holding himself upright still, controlling his breathing and watching every move Eliot made with a weary kind of focus. Parker could see him thinking his way through how he wanted every part of his body to move.

And Eliot was watching Hardison just as closely, but he was as relaxed as Parker had ever seen him. He was moving in casual slow motion, moving closer in to see what Hardison would do, turning from side to side and changing the angles, raising a hand as if to go for a punch, dancing backward and inviting Hardison to follow him. He never came right up to Hardison or made any real attempt at a strike, and he didn’t say a word. He just tested and tested and tested and tested.

Parker’s heart was full as she watched them, her two beautiful boys. Maybe they’d had to kiss first, before they could start dancing like this. 

When Eliot next glanced around the room he saw her there by the door, but he didn’t say anything, and so Parker felt free to sit on the steps and watch in silence. It didn’t make any difference to Eliot, but if Hardison realized she was there his concentration would break, and Parker didn’t want to ruin the session, especially not if it was the first one ever. She had a funny feeling it might be. 

It would just be better if there were snacks. There was some kind of faint spicy meat smell in the air and her stomach was rumbly, but the pub kitchen behind her was closed and dark, and she wouldn’t risk moving any further into this room and disturbing the exercise.

So she sat patiently for several minutes, watching. Hardison was starting to slip out of the zone every so often and had to snap himself back into it, and every single time he gave it away by blinking hard and shaking his head a little. His stretches of concentration were getting shorter and shorter, and each time he had to reset himself Eliot started moving a little bit faster, more unpredictably, a little bit sharper. Hardison was doing his best to keep up, but Parker could see the balance tipping before her eyes.

And you could guarantee that when it all got too much for Hardison, he’d start up talking. That was his real natural defense.

“Come on, man,” he said after he’d stumbled off-balance after a deceptively quick right-to-left-to-right bit of footwork by Eliot. “We ain’t done enough yet?”

Eliot bounced in a couple of steps and shaped up for a vicious knee to the ribs. Hardison jumped back out of reach and landed flat-footed. Parker winced.

“That ain’t no good,” Eliot said, flapping his fingers at Hardison to get him moving again. “That’s a lazy move.”

Hardison exhaled loudly and got back into form, but there was no way he’d shut up again now that the silence had been broken. “We’ve been doing this for hours, man.”

“It’s been forty-five minutes,” Eliot said, sliding around to Hardison’s right. “Move your feet.”

“Gimme a montage any day,” Hardison mumbled, moving backwards and left with heavy steps. “This is cruel and unusual punishment, is what it is.”

“Technique matters most when you’re dog-tired,” Eliot said. “You train so that when it finally comes down to it, you don’t gotta think.”

“That explains plenty,” Hardison said.

“Yeah?” said Eliot, bouncing a little bit on his feet and raising his eyebrows.

Hardison saw it coming just in time to dodge one swing, block an elbow and stumble backwards fast enough to miss most of the impact of a jab to the solar plexus. His footwork went straight to hell, and if Eliot had been in kill mode instead of playing with his food mode, Hardison would be a splatter up against the wall.

Instead he just stood there rubbing his belly and glaring at Eliot. “Honor among thieves, huh.”

Eliot grinned and held his hand out for a bro-shake. “Forty-five minutes ain’t a bad start.”

“Can I say again, man,” Hardison said, gripping Eliot’s hand and leaning in for the chest bump as well. “Regrets.”

The chest bump was nearly two seconds longer than Parker was used to between them, and what they might call backslaps were really more like a kind of vigorous hug. When they pulled away, Hardison had a little secret smile on his face, and Eliot was looking really happy with himself and just as much happy with Hardison. Then he pointed right over at Parker and Hardison spun around to look, so she went over and quickly hopped up to sit on the main workstation, between Hardison’s laptop and Eliot’s shirt and jacket.

“Hey, girl,” said Hardison, wandering over. “How did it –”

“Did you lose a bet?” Parker asked him, trying to look bright and inquisitive and interested and not like she was trying to deflect his question. If Hardison was as exhausted as he looked, there was a chance she might even get away with it.

“What? Did I –”

“Lose a bet.” 

Hardison looked back at Eliot, but he got no help there. Eliot just stood where he was and waited to be amused by whatever answer Hardison might manage to come up with. 

“You know,” Parker said, holding her fists up in a mock-boxing pose and kicking her legs out in front of her. “Pew-pew.”

“Lose a bet?” Hardison said, starting to gesticulate. He had such nice arms. “Hell no. This is all part of the – you know, the – it’s professional development, babe. It ain’t no thing. You know, I recommend everyone, like, broaden – ain’t nothing to it.”

Hardison’s pride was ridiculous. As if there was something shameful about learning something from one of the greatest fighters in the whole world, who’d been _trying_ to teach him for years and years. As if finally deciding to do the mature and professional thing was some kind of embarrassing failure he had to try and talk his way around. It was something to do with manliness, as far as Parker could work out, so of course it didn’t make any sense. Hardison was like that sometimes.

She realized too late that she’d been quiet for too long and Hardison was going to go back to his question. 

“So did you –” 

Parker was saved by Hardison’s phone alarm going off further down the desk from Parker. “Oh shit, the raid, the raid,” he said, hurrying over to turn it off. There was effort in every step he took, and Parker knew tomorrow they were in for a really fun day of complaints about Hardison’s sore absolutely everything. 

“Y’all carry on,” Hardison said, walking backwards towards the stairs. “I _cannot_ miss another raid this month. I cannot. Okay. Laters. We’ll –” Then he stopped, took two deep breaths and shook his head. “No.” He looked at Parker and took a couple of steps back towards her. “We can talk, babe, if you –”

Parker lifted his sweater off the back of a nearby chair and threw it to him, waving him away. He paused for a second then nodded, pulled the sweater over his head and headed upstairs, disappearing from view. Eliot looked kind of annoyed watching him go. 

“You’ll get used to it,” Parker told him. “He has to do them. Is there any food for me?”

* * *

There was food for Parker: lamb koftas, cabbage something something, some kind of yogurt thing, pita bread. Normally Parker would listen to all the names of things when Eliot told her, but her head was too full tonight so she’d just sat down at the side table, taken the meat sticks out of the foil they’d been wrapped in, put some of everything in a pile in the middle of a piece of bread, wrapped it up and started to eat.

Eliot dragged a chair over as well and he sat kind of diagonally facing her and the table, leaning on the table with his left elbow and drinking from a bottle of water in his right hand. Close enough that Parker knew she could talk to him if she wanted, distant enough that she knew she didn’t have to if she didn’t want.

So what could they talk about that wasn’t Hayley Drummond? Parker ran through the list of things she had in her mind to eventually bring up with Eliot and made a calculated choice.

“Before we start on the book,” she said, “do you want to do any revenge jobs?”

Eliot gave her a long, long look. Parker took another bite, chewed, swallowed, waited for his answer. If anyone knew people who needed to be taken down, it was Eliot. There were far more bad people in his line of work than just Damien Moreau, and Parker knew some of them had definitely done Eliot wrong. He never brought it up, but she knew.

“That’s a hell of a question to ask, Parker,” he said after a whole minute. Parker had finished one whole rolled up thing and was putting together another one.

“I just think if we have any personal jobs we want to do, we should do them,” she explained, carefully folding the bread so it would keep its structural integrity and not leak yogurt everywhere. “You know, before we get all busy.”

Eliot switched the bottle from his right hand to his left then put it down on the table. “You ask Hardison if he wants to do any revenge jobs?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Parker. “He said he already does them in his spare time.”

Eliot raised his eyebrows at that. He still didn’t fully get how many things Hardison could do at once, especially when it was often so easy for Hardison to ruin a person’s life. Once he’d broken up a whole online hate group just by hacking into one guy’s Facebook, posting his last private message as a status update and locking him out of the account. It had taken two minutes and eighteen seconds.

Parker finished her second serving. Eventually, Eliot answered. “I don’t want to go back to that,” he said. Parker couldn’t analyze the expression he had, and she didn’t have any words to describe it, but she didn’t need to. This was one of those moments that they had sometimes where they breathed together, they saw each other and they were exactly the same. 

Parker had never felt so much the same as anybody until she’d started to understand Eliot.

“You got any revenge jobs, Parker?” he asked, quiet and direct, and she knew he felt it too.

Parker remembered Eliot saying _I could_ when she’d wanted that psychic dead. Tortured, maimed and dead. Extremely violently, painfully, pointedly dead. _I could_ , he’d said.

“No,” she said. “I don’t want to go back either.”

He looked at her sidelong. Parker looked at him right back. “You gonna call Archie’s daughter?” he said.

Parker didn’t think that was fair. This conversation was not supposed to be about that, and he’d turned it all around on her. She hadn’t even told him that she hadn’t made the call. She’d been very carefully avoiding the whole subject, and she’d specifically brought up a very distracting _other_ subject, and here was Eliot seeing right through her and ruining the whole thing.

“Hayley,” Parker reminded him.

“Yeah. You gonna call her?”

And now he’d brought it up she couldn’t dodge him or lie about it, because at the moment they were the same. The same wavelength, Hardison might call it, but it wasn’t exactly that. Parker didn’t know what to call these moments where she was talking to Eliot and she could drop all the stupid rules about how human beings were supposed to communicate, and he didn’t bother trying to be Eliot-Eliot and just talked to her as well.

“I don’t want to,” she said flatly. “I was going to, but then I didn’t want to.”

“You know why?”

Parker could feel herself scowling, getting tight around the shoulders. Her toes were curling. “No.”

“Hm,” Eliot said. “Okay.”

“Sophie would be able to tell me,” Parker said.

“Would she?”

“Yes.”

“I can tell you what she’d say,” said Eliot, matter-of-fact. “She’d say you’ve wanted to be part of Archie’s family for so long that now it looks possible, you’re scared of being rejected at the last stage. She’d say you’ve thought all along you could never fit in with a normal family. She’d say because Hayley seems so honest and normal and she was so nice in her email, you think she could never like you.”

Those kinds of things sure sounded nicer coming from Sophie than they did from Eliot. When Sophie gave advice, she took things that Parker didn’t know, or sometimes already kind of knew somewhere inside, and put them into words so Parker could think about them properly, in her own time. She gave Parker information and a path forward. It was helpful, and Parker missed her, and Eliot’s version was not at all the same.

“Sophie makes suggestions as well,” Parker told him. “She doesn’t just say all my problems like that.”

“Yeah?” Eliot stood up and stretched out his back. Now Parker could tell he was Eliot-Eliot again, and they were back as part of the regular world. “I _suggest_ you think about all the honest people you’ve made friends with these past years,” he said. “But I ain’t writing out the list for you.”

Parker stuck her tongue out at him, and he gave her the dirtiest, most unimpressed look. Good. He didn’t get to just turn the whole conversation around on her, pretend to be Sophie for one minute and then walk out like he was king of the world. That wasn’t how things worked around here.

As he walked around gathering his things, Parker tried to think about what he’d said, but the thoughts weren’t sticking properly. She had a nearly normal friendship with Peggy, that was true, but Eliot was buttoning up his shirt and she’d turned to sit sideways in her chair so she could watch him, and she couldn’t look away. She liked it when they worked with Maggie, and she thought Maggie liked her as well, but Eliot was checking his phone, and once he’d gone back to his own place that would be the only way Parker had left to talk to him. Amy came to movie night every month, and they were either acquaintances or friends by now, but Eliot was swinging on his jacket and shoving his feet into his boots and Parker felt kind of hollow and sore inside.

“You don’t have to always go back,” she said, because if she didn’t say _something_ it would start to really hurt.

Eliot stood there with his boots unlaced and looked across the room at her. Parker didn’t know what to say next, so she just put her chin on her hands on the back of her chair and waited.

“It’s past midnight,” Eliot said. 

“So what? You’d just be coming back in the morning anyway. You can save travel time, and you get more rest. The city is a dangerous place, you know. Crime rates and so on. They’re … up.”

“Parker,” he said. “Just say whatever you wanna say.”

Eliot had started it, saying it was after midnight when that had nothing to do with anything at all. Parker had simply been respecting his terrible conversation style. She was more than happy to go back to hers and stop stepping sideways around things. “I don’t want you to go,” she said. “I think you should stay. Hardison likes it when you’re here. I like it when you’re here. You don’t even want to go, so I don’t know why you keep doing it. Nobody wins when you go.”

It felt good to say it. Parker’s insides weren’t aching any more.

Eliot stepped out of his boots again and kicked them up against the workstation. He came and sat back down next to her, jacket still on. “This place has one bedroom,” he said. “What’s your plan here?”

First the midnight thing, now this. Two obvious facts, and Parker had to dig around underneath them to find out what he was thinking. “We’ve shared a room before,” she said. “On that cruise ship it was me and you and Hardison in one cabin, and that was for nine days.”

“Yeah,” said Eliot. “Thanks for reminding me.”

“And back when we had the two hotel rooms in Calgary and on the very first night I had to swap with Nate because he was talking in his sleep and you threatened to kill him and Hardison was recording the whole thing and you all made so much noise Sophie couldn’t sleep.”

“Yup.”

“And we’ve always slept in the car when we were –”

“Okay, Parker. Yes. Okay.”

Parker waited to see if he had any more facts that she would have to decode. She waited for twenty seconds, and she couldn’t wait any longer. “Just say whatever you wanna say,” she said. 

He grimaced and looked at her sideways. When he spoke, his voice sounded funny. “It’s different here, at home. It ain’t the same.”

“Yes it is.”

“Parker, it ain’t.”

“Eliot,” said Parker, “it is.”

“Does Hardison even want –”

“Why do you think he did up the bedroom so nice?”

Eliot looked at her incredulously. “Because you and him stay up there a lot and he wants better for his girl than to have her sleeping on a futon? Because he likes to be comfortable? Because living inside of him is a little interior designer just screaming to be let out and every now and again he has to throw them a bone?”

Those were all mostly true, but they still missed the point. 

“He got a bigger bed than was there to start off with,” Parker said. “King size. He didn’t have to do that. He’s made a place for your stuff upstairs as well, not just out here. Our whole restaurant is here. I’m not a mind-reader but I think he wants you here.” 

Eliot sighed deeply and slouched back a bit.

“If you _want_ to go, then just go any time,” Parker said. “That’s what I do. But don’t go if you don’t have to.”

He didn’t move. 

Parker was going to keep going, say so many things to him that he couldn’t argue back against the sheer weight of numbers, but as she was thinking what arguments she was going to use on him, a bunch of things clicked together in her head without warning and she finally understood how all her feelings were supposed to fit together. It was a beautiful moment of clarity, like two locks clicking open at the exact same time and the door swinging slowly, silently open.

She was used to that kind of thing in the field, but not so much in her personal life. 

It probably had something to do with not having had a personal life.

Eliot was looked at her weirdly now. Maybe he’d said something and she hadn’t noticed. Oh well. She’d lost track of that conversation anyway. Her thoughts had upgraded and now she was on a whole new level.

“I used to really desperately want to be family to Archie,” Parker said. Eliot knew that, but she had to say it so she could explain the part that came next.

“Yeah.”

“But I’m not desperate now.”

“Yeah?”

This was the part that Parker didn’t know how to put in words. It made so much sense to her, and she thought Eliot would get it if she explained, but she didn’t know _how_ to explain it.

Maybe he would understand even if she didn’t explain it. She felt herself drifting back into the past, into Serbia on the orphanage job, where she’d learned about Hardison’s Nana and she’d gone to save those kids because otherwise she’d have exploded, and the whole team had come in after her, and Hardison had said _You don’t work alone any more_ , and she’d known right then and there that something new was starting.

Eliot was still and silent, watching her. She smiled across at him, remembering old Parker and old Eliot and old Hardison and comparing them to their updated versions. “We’re a little more than a team.”

He smiled back too, just a little, but he looked a bit puzzled as well. Maybe he didn’t remember that day quite like she did. Maybe he didn’t remember it at all. Or maybe he did remember and he knew what she meant and he was just surprised that someone was finally saying it.

Because Eliot _knew_ they were more than just a team, everyone knew that, but they didn’t say it so much. All the times they’d talked, every agreement they’d made between the three of them, even in all the talks they’d had about the team after Nate and Sophie went off to be married, even after Hardison and Eliot’s revelation that they really liked kissing each other, no one was putting what was happening into words. No one was breaking it down and making it easy to understand.

Maybe it was just that none of them had that easy a relationship with the word “family”, but as far as Parker was concerned, it was about time they did. They could have been using it all this time, and then Parker would be used to it by now, and there’d be nothing scary at all about Archie’s daughter reaching out to her. She’d have known from the first time reading the email that it was an opportunity to add to her family, not her first and last chance to ever be part of one. It was all so obvious now that she’d realized it.

Eliot cleared his throat. “It’s probably a thing to have a conversation about, then,” he said. “Properly.”

Parker focused on him, which she’d been too busy thinking to do in a while. He looked kind of worried, or concerned, or maybe just nervous. She hadn’t seen him nervous that much to be able to recognize it when she saw it.

“Isn’t that what we’re doing right now?”

Eliot flicked his eyes upwards. “With him as well.”

“He’ll come back if we ask him,” Parker said. “There’s just a lot of timezone stuff with his orc friends. It’s all very fiddly, so he doesn’t like to miss it.”

Eliot’s face moved from annoyed to resigned to something Parker couldn’t identify. Something subtle. 

“It’s fine,” he said. “In the morning.”

Parker tried not to look too triumphant, but from the way he’d said that, she knew she’d won. He was going to stay. She, Parker, had talked him into staying. Hardison hadn’t helped, Sophie hadn’t helped. Parker had talked Eliot into staying _and_ now she felt good about Hayley Drummond as well, and nobody had helped her with that one either, except Eliot just a teeny little bit.

Now Eliot was giving her a kind of dark look, but she was doing her best. Sometimes emotions could be viewed on the human face. That wasn’t Parker’s fault.

“Okay,” she said, trying to dim her smile and radiate calmness instead of joy. Eliot might need some time to catch up with her on the family thing. Maybe he wasn’t ready for joy yet. “In the morning.”

Eliot sighed, nodded at her and stood up. “There is gonna be a conversation, though,” he said. 

“Good,” said Parker. “Then after that I’ll know what to say to Hayley.”

Eliot looked at her quizzically, which for him meant one side of his mouth moved and he crinkled his eyes a bit.

“One family at a time,” Parker explained. “It’s like triage. I want to call her as soon as possible, too. We can settle our stuff over breakfast.”

Eliot didn’t react at all to her calling them a family, which was interesting. Maybe he’d already known it but had been holding off on saying it. Maybe Hardison had as well. Maybe they all knew it but nobody had wanted to say it first. Maybe they had been waiting for _her_.

Parker would have to think about that one.

“Yeah, sure,” Eliot said. “Over breakfast. We’ll settle our _stuff_ over breakfast. No problemo.”

Parker just _looooved_ sarcasm so much. She really really really loved it, especially when it was pointed right at her. “Good night then,” she said. “Don’t sleep on the side by the window. Bye.”

It was fun watching Eliot when he was mad about something but he didn’t want to act mad. A lot of frowning and jaw-tensing and nose-wrinkling. This time he ended up just walking off upstairs without saying anything, not even “bye” back. Parker smiled to herself and took out her phone to read the email again. 

* * *

Parker always checked in on Hardison if he was still up when she was going to bed or leaving the building, just in case he was asleep or close to it and needed to be reminded that he had a bed. Tonight Parker had thought there would be a pretty good chance she’d find him asleep on his keyboard, but she hadn’t even gone through the upstairs door yet when she heard him doing his computer game banter. “You know,” he said. “We have a good arrangement. You make the weapons. I use them.” 

It was his quoting voice, but Parker didn’t recognise the quote. Whatever it was, it sounded like the raid would be going on for a little while yet. Hardison let out some kind of victorious yelp and a “dayum” as Parker walked by that closed door and around the corner to the bedroom.

Eliot was lying on his left side on the right-hand side of the bed, so once Parker had gotten changed she slid in on the left, nearest the window. Eliot’s breathing shifted a bit, so she’d at least semi-woken him, but it didn’t take long before he was back to normal. 

There was something about Eliot being asleep that always made Parker sleepier as well. She’d been planning to think over everything that had happened today and plan what she was going to say in the morning, but instead she lay there quiet and fuzzy and thoughtless until Eliot’s steady breathing and the warm bed sent her to sleep.

* * *

She woke when Hardison came into the room, as she always did. She knew the way he opened the door and pulled it closed behind him, the pattern of his quiet steps across the floor. He didn’t make it all the way to the bed this time, though, before he stopped in his tracks and drew in a long, controlled breath.

Parker smiled but kept her eyes closed. She wanted to stretch this feeling out as long as possible so she could never, ever forget it. If Hardison needed time to take the moment in, Parker had plenty of that.

“How long exactly,” Eliot said, his voice muffled by his pillow, “are you going to stand there?”

“Depends,” Hardison said in a voice thick with sleepiness. “Is anyone gonna move, or have y’all set up a blockade?”

“Oh,” said Parker, opening her eyes and scooting down towards the foot of the bed. She’d remembered that it had to be Hardison in the middle because he was the only one who didn’t mind being boxed in, but she’d somehow forgotten that he was tall and a bit clumsy even when he wasn’t fatigued and would want to get in bed from one side, not climb straight up the middle like Parker would herself. 

He shuffled around behind her with barely an ounce of muscle control, flopping down between her and Eliot with a deep, exhausted sigh. Parker moved back to her original spot and flapped all the blankets back into place. 

It was a very good bed, Parker thought. Easily room for three.

“Good night,” she said, rolling onto her left side and closing her eyes.

“Good night,” said Hardison, and Parker couldn’t see his smile, but she didn’t need to.

“Hmrmgh,” said Eliot. He shifted around for about two seconds to get comfortable, then went still again. Hardison lay flat on his back, apparently too tired to say another word or move a single muscle. Parker closed her eyes again. Now she had the memory of Hardison and Eliot training together and the way they’d hugged after, she had the moment Eliot had agreed to stay with them, the moment Hardison had walked in and realized it, and this moment of them all lying here together, all perfect memories from the one single day. 

Eliot had been right that sharing at home wasn’t the same thing as sharing on the road.

It was better.


End file.
